


company of the wolf

by Papaveri



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/F, First Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-31 01:40:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6450295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papaveri/pseuds/Papaveri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Robin understands how the world is going to end, and Sumia decides to follow her when she decides to spirit herself away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	company of the wolf

_Will you still love me_

_when I am a spooky ghost?_

 

_(yes. Yes, always, yes.)_

 

 

It takes a while, to get your legs out of the sky – at first, Sumia's calves feel oddly stiff, when the first week goes without the reassuring firmness of her pegasus' body between them, not ever for a short  flight to unlock her wings. Even with the harsh winters of Valm, the air near the earth is always warmer that the wind that used to tousle her hair.

(Now, that's something Robin's fingers do. That doesn't get as much time to get used to, even if they feel like burning sometimes, freshly melted caramel on her scalp, the momentary prickling of uprooted hairs that got too tangled with her hands).

 

The war ended with Say'ri's blade finding a weak spot in the joints of Walhart's armor, in a fast and dirty movement. They left behind a tattered coat and a lost, whining animal with a broken wing.

 

(Robin told her:

 

when Tiki spoke of the way they were similar, in a gentle remark that almost belonged in small talk, the words ripped through her like an arrow and felt as if they too had scales, and that night she thought, she thought of her father's words and of faded myths and legends and recalled in the foggy remains of her memory the image of a woman who looked like her, who had big, warm hands and took her across the Plegian desert, a woman who taught her to read tomes with hands stained with dark magic.

“But I don't really understand dark magic. Do you think I forgot that too, Sumia?”

The first nights after they leave the army in a flurry of iron and blood, she slept in Robin's arms and while she lulled herself to sleep with words that shone lightning between her fingers, Sumia thought of Cordelia.)

 

They move frequently, but not frequently enough for any of them to feel like a fugitive; at least, Sumia doesn't feel like one, and takes spare jobs and lets her muscles soften. She keeps her hairpins, and when she starts preferring her hair as an easy, soft weight of natural curls on her shoulders, she spends a night modifying them into earrings.

She gives one to Robin, and with the little piece on her hands she asks her to cut her hair.

(“As short as you can, please”, she says, although she has always kept it long, even in battles; during their last encounter with the valmese army, she cut the hand of a soldier who had tried to grab her by one of her twin tails, and then recoiled, jerked violently as if nauseated, and wiped the blood out of her face. 

When Sumia is done, she kisses the nape of her neck and Robin laughs softly before clasping her hand that holds the scissors. 

“You had such a good idea, though!”, Sumia says. “Your hair would have hidden my earring, if you had left it like that. Maybe I should cut it too?”

Robin kisses her curls, though, and she likes that; when her lips go to her mouth, Sumia  glances at her face for a second, and her eyelashes look like feathers, thick and dark as the night).

 

Sometimes they sleep in the open, and Sumia nestles in  Robin's lap like she did when they still were with the Shepherds. It's nice, letting your legs stretch like that, in between hers; Robin's legs are long and thin and now her knees are more visible, but it's true that they've been eating differently, and maybe she's losing her tone faster – doesn't that happen with mages, after all? She recalls Ricken's spindly limbs, almost lost in his tunic, and she felts a short, sharp pang at the base of her stomach.

(In the dark, Robin's eyes seem to glint a bit like a cat's, like stars.

She tells her stories of the constellations with almost too much detail, with fast hands that connect uncertain dots; but Sumia follows, because she understands the skies better than, maybe not better than anyone but better than most people, and listens intently to myths she may have read on a book before.

It's always princes chasing evil, dragons that want to swallow the world, so much heartbreak – Sumia thinks for a second that if she has to have her heart broken, it should be like that, in a great tragedy that razes the land.

Isn't the night supposed to be humbling?)

 

(One afternoon when Sumia has trouble recalling the name of her pegasus, her hands running down Robin's sides seem to find something that feels like scales and feathers, something that bleeds from a spot in her back down her left thigh like a scar, but she stops paying attention to it when Robin's blunt nails dig on the thin skin above her ribs, scrape gently over her knees, part her ankles.

Maybe she hasn't forgotten dark magic – it works like that, she's hear about it from Henry's smile, full of crooked teeth, it works with the entrails of birds and lizards and so much faith.

He said she didn't have a magic bone in her body, but she wouldn't mind the blood, and she believes so firmly.

 

In her dreams, Robin smiles like the deep sea creatures she feared in her childhood, old as water and dust, and has arms like a tree and eyes like the Milky Way. She'd think that too many, but it's never too many, is it.)

 

When the world ends, Sumia thinks of that night when they watched the stars and Robin told her about a knight turning a dragon into a damsel by kissing it three times instead of fighting, no matter how much his legs were trembling or how clouded with tears of terror were his eyes. Her hand grazes the rim of Robin's (she shouldn't think of _that_ in those terms, but she feels she's draining the power from it in that way) mouth, her lips touch the sharp side of a tooth.

Only once.

**Author's Note:**

> Technically, this kept me through my April schedule of writing at least 1000 words a day. It has only 1000 words instead of 3000 because it's the third draft!
> 
> The first two attempts were way too melodramatic, and I tried to have a more... calm before the storm feeling with this. Melancholy more than sad, I guess? I also originally intended to give it a happy ending, but I guess we have to content ourselves with a happy middle.  
> This is supposed to diverge from the timeline Lucina is from but I'm honestly not sure how much I changed. I played the main storyline a while ago and the canon isn't exactly verbose on it...
> 
> The bit at the end with the knight and the dragon is taken from Arthurian mythos, I'm told! About Sir Gawain and, well, a lady dragon. And the bit at the start is from A softer world, because I was feeling nostalgic.
> 
> Anyway! I hope you enjoyed it. April is the month for love stories involving dragons, after all.


End file.
